Thoughts on Technology, Product, & Strategy

Month: January 2018

Steven Sinofsky of a16z (previously Microsoft) probably first coined the phrase, “Don’t ship the org chart”. I think there’s a new variant of this worth discussing: shipping the microservices. I’ve been reviewing a few products in depth recently for different reaasons, and once you see it, it actually becomes really obvious.

There are few options in the cloud that are really worth investing time in. Amazon (AWS) is clearly important as the market leader, and Google Cloud (GCP) offers a variety of very interesting technology. Microsoft (Azure) has some remarkable technology, especially for Windows-oriented shops. After that, options are much smaller scale: there are big names like IBM (BlueMix) to much newer startups (such as Digital Ocean). None of them are very distinct. However, if we’re willing to take a slightly less western-centric approach, there is another: AliCloud.

Everyone is now talking about the CPU security problems that are now being fully disclosed: they’re dubbed Meltdown and Spectre. Meltdown is a problem that mainly or entirely affects Intel CPUs, but Spectre is a problem that affects all designs.

I haven’t seen any “explain it like I’m 5” on the Spectre paper yet, so here’s my take. Sadly, it’s not 5-year-old level, but I’ve tried to make it a bit more accessible. If you want a lot more detail, the Google blog has code.

I just listened to “Troubleshooting Agile”, a new audio series from CTO Craft contributor Douglas Squirrel and his podcast partner Jeffrey Fredrick. The first edition is on blameless culture, which I think is a great starting point: it’s very difficult to develop, and taking baby steps toward that in a team which doesn’t have it often feels wrong.